Missing Features

Signs — like all things — can be well designed or badly designed.

Steve Krause wrote a short blog post about bad traffic sign usability in San Francisco that nicely demonstrates a major problem with signage in the United States: inadequate upcoming landmark alerts.

More simply, most road signs are placed at the intersection of that street – not very helpful when you need to make a corrective driving decision based on street names. Changing three lanes to the left in heavy traffic is a bit tricky in most densely populated urban centers.

The low tech solution has already arrived (at least in the US): placing an additional upcoming street sign a few hundred feet before the actual street intersection. This is a great addition to road usability, but this isn’t a perfect solution. The additional signs aren’t used everywhere: only major intersections seem to warrant the investment of an additional sign.

Looking Ahead

The long term solution is easy: driver windshield HUDs will integrate with GPS information to overlay a virtual upcoming street sign in the drivers field of vision. While the sign will be a virtual projection on the windshield, it will appear exactly as a real anchored sign would, growing in size and eventually passing by the driver.

Why not just show the street name in a mini-map on the windshield? Too much driver distraction. Cell phones, radios and even rowdy passengers can lead to driver distraction. Unnatural visual displays on windshields would be an automatve disaster.

The best approach with a windshield HUD is to add data to the drivers environment in a natural way so as to present the information in a format the driver is already accustomed to (and can safely) process.

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